The other day I stopped by CNN.com to find a sub-headline of “We’re running out of internet addresses” catching my eye. These articles always amuse me so I clicked through and read “Are you ready for the big internet crunch?“. What fear mongering are they up to today? A lot, apparently, since the first line is “The internet as we know it is reaching its limits.“. Come on CNN, I know there are slow news days, but this is sad. Not only is any article announcing the end of the IPv4 address space so utterly redundant that it shouldn’t even make “slow news day” (maybe “no news days”), it is absurd fear mongering. Why?
IPv6 Oh, and lets not forget my old favorite: NAT. Why NAT? “In the mid-1990s NAT became a popular tool for alleviating the IPv4 address exhaustion“. Wait, wait, wait. So… you’re saying that since the mid-90’s, which is roughly 15 years ago now… we knew about this problem. Yup, that’s exactly what both Wikipedia and I are saying. So CNN is running news that is literally 15 years old.
I actually like CNN. It is my favorite of the mainstream media sites. That being said, I really dislike fear mongering, which is all this article ends up being, and I don’t think that it should have a place on a news site of this caliber.